much to clear up the confusion? Did it exterminate the vice in the
language by substituting a better _formula_? Not at all. Immanuel Kant
was, we admit, the most potent amongst all known intellects for
functions of pure abstraction. But also, viewed in two separate
relations: first, in relation to all _practical_ interests (manners,
legislation, government, spiritual religion); secondly, in relation to
the arts of teaching, of explaining, of communicating any man's meaning
where it happened to be dark or perplexed (above all, if that meaning
were his own)--this same Kant was merely impotent; absolutely, and 'no
mistake,' a child of darkness. Were it not that veneration and gratitude
cause us to suspend harsh words with regard to such a man, who has upon
the greatest question affecting our human reason almost, we might say,
_revealed_ the truth (viz., in his theory of the categories), we should
describe him, and continually we are tempted to describe him as the most
superhuman of recorded blockheads. Would it be credited, that at this
time of day, actually in the very closing years of the eighteenth
century, a man armed with some reading, but not too much study--and
sixty years' profound meditation should treat it as a matter of obvious
good sense that crowns and the succession to mighty empires ought to
travel along the line of 'merit'; not exactly on the ground of personal
beauty, or because the pretender was taller by the head than most of his
subjects--no, _that_ would be the idea of a barbarous nation. Thank God!
a royal professor of Koenigsberg was above _that_. But on the assumption
of an _appropriate_ merit, as if, for instance, he were wiser, if he
were well grounded in Transcendentalism, if he had gained a prize for
'virtue,' surely, surely, such graces ought to ensure a sceptre to their
honoured professor. Especially when we consider how _readily_ these
personal qualities _prove_ themselves to the general understanding, and
how cheerfully they are always _allowed_ by jealous and abominating
competitors! Now turn from this haughty philosopher to a plain but most
sensible and reflecting scholar--Isaac Casaubon. This man pretended to
no philosophy, but a sincere, docile heart, much good sense, and patient
observation of his own country's annals, which in the midst of
belligerent papists, and very much against his own interest, had made
him a good Church of England Protestant, made him also intensely
attached to the doctrine of fixed succession under closer and clearer
limitations than exist even in England. For a thousand years this one
plain rule had been the amulet for liberating France (else so
constitutionally disposed to war) from the bloodiest of intestine
contests. The man's career was pretty nearly concurrent as to its two
limits with that of our own Shakespeare. Both he and Shakespeare were
patronized, or, at least, countenanced by James the First, and both died
many years before their patron. More than two centuries by a good deal
have therefore passed away since he spoke, but this is the emphatic
testimony which even at that time, wanting the political experience
superadded, he bore to the peace and consequently to the civilization
won for his country by this divine maxim, this _lex trabalis_ (as so
powerfully Casaubon calls it) of hereditary succession, the cornerstone,
the main beam, in the framework of Gallic polity. These are the words:
'_Occidebant et occidebantur_' (_i.e._, in those days of Roman Cæsars)
'_immanitate pari; cum in armis esset jus omne regnandi_'--in the sword
lay the arbitration of the title. He speaks of the horrid murderous
uniformity by which the Western Empire moved through five centuries (for
it commenced in murder 42 years B.C. and lasted for 477 after Christ).
But why? Simply by default of any conventional rule, and the consequent
necessity that men should fall back upon the title of the strongest. For
that ridiculous plausibility of Kant's superscribed with _Detur
meliori_, it should never be forgotten, is so far from having any
pacific tendencies, that originally, according to the eldest of Greek
fables, it was [Greek: Eris], Eris, the goddess of dissension, no
peace-making divinity, who threw upon a wedding-table the fatal apple
thus ominously labelled. _Meliori_! in that one word went to wreck the
harmony of the company. But for France, for the famous kingdom of the
Fleur-de-lys, for the first-born child of Christianity, always so prone
by her gentry to this sword-right, Nature herself had been silenced
through a long millennium by this one almighty amulet. 'Inde' (that is,
from this standing appeal made to personal vanity or to ambition
amongst Roman nobles)--'_inde_ haec tam spissa principatuum mutatio: quâ
re nulla alia miseris populis ne dici quidem aut fingi queat
perniciosior.' So often, he goes on to say, as this dreadful curse
entailed upon Rome Imperial comes into my mind, so often 'Franciæ patriæ
meæ felicitatem non possim non prædicare; quæ sub imperio Regum
sexaginta trium (LXIII)--non dicam CLX annos' (which had been the upshot
of time, the 'tottle,' upon sixty-three Imperatores) sed paullo minus
CIO (one clear thousand, observe) 'et CC--rem omnibus seculis
inauditam!--egit beata; fared prosperously; et egisset beatior, si sua
semper bona intellexisset. Tanti est, jura regiæ successionis trabali
lege semel fixisse.' Aye, faithful and sagacious Casaubon! there lies
the secret. In that word '_fixisse_'--the having settled once and for
ever, the having laid down as beams and main timbers those adamantine
rules of polity which leave no opening to doubt, no licence to caprice,
and no temptation to individual ambition. We are all interested,
Christendom to her very depths is interested, in the well-being and
progress of this glorious realm--the kingdom of the lilies, the kingdom
of Charlemagne and his paladins; from the very fierceness and angry
vigilance of whose constant hostility to ourselves has arisen one chief
re-agent in sustaining our own concurrent advancement. Under the torpor
of a German patriotism, under the languor of a _sensus communis_ which
is hardly at all developed, our own unrivalled energy would partially
have gone to sleep. We are, therefore, deeply indebted to the rancorous
animosity of France. And in this one article of a sound political creed
we must be sensible that France, so dreadfully in arrear as to all other
political wisdom, has run ahead of ourselves. For to what else was
owing our ruinous war of the Two Roses than to an original demur in our
courts of law whether the descendant of an elder son through the female
line had a title preferable or inferior to that of a descendant in the
male line from a son confessedly _junior_? Whether the element to the
right hand of uncontested superiority balanced or did _not_ balance that
element to the left hand of undenied inferiority? How well for us
English, and for the interests of our literature so cruelly barbarized
within fifty years from the death of Chaucer (A.D. 1400), had we been
able to intercept the murderous conflicts of Barnet, Towcester,
Tewkesbury, St. Albans! How happy for Spain, had no modern line of
French coxcombs (not succeeding by any claim of blood, but under the
arbitrary testament of a paralytic dotard) interfered to tamper with the
old Castilian rules, so that no man knew whether the Spanish custom or
the French innovation really governed. The Salic law or the interested
abrogation of that law were the governing principle in strict
constitutional practice. To this point had the French dynasty brought
matters, that no lawyer even could say on which side the line of
separation lay the _onus_ of treason. We have ultimately so far improved
our law of succession by continued limitations, that now even the
religion of a prince has become one amongst his indispensable
qualifications. But how matters once stood, we see written in letters of
blood. And yet to this state of perilous uncertainty would Kant have
reduced every nation under the conceit of mending their politics. 'Orbis
terrarum dominatio'--_that_, says Casaubon, was the prize at stake. And
how was it awarded? '_In parricidii præmium cedebat._' By tendency, by
usage, by natural gravitation, this Imperial dignity passed into a
bounty upon murder, upon treasonable murder, upon parricidal murder. For
the oath of fealty to the _sacra Cæsaria majestas_ was of awful
obligation, although the previous title of the particular Cæsar had been
worth nothing at all. And the consequent condition of insecurity, the
shadowy tenure of all social blessings, is described by Casaubon in
language truly forcible.
Kant's purpose, as elsewhere we shall show, was not primarily with the
maxim: that was but a secondary purpose. His direct and real object lay
in one or two of the illustrative cases under the maxim. With this
particular obliquity impressed upon the movement of his own essay, we
can have no right to quarrel. Kant had an author's right to deal with
the question as best suited his own views. But with one feature of his
treatment we quarrel determinately. He speaks of this most popular (and,
we venture to add, most wise and beneficial) maxim, which arms men's
suspicions against all that is merely speculative, on the ground that it
is continually at war with the truth of practical results, as though it
were merely and blankly a vulgar error, as though _sans phrase_ it might
be dismissed for nonsense. But, because there is a casual inaccuracy in
the wording of a great truth, we are not at liberty to deny that truth,
to evade it, to 'ignore' it, or to confound a faulty expression with a
meaning originally untenable. Professor Kant, of all men, was least
entitled to plead blindness as to the substance in virtue of any vice
affecting the form. No man knew better the art of translating so wise
and beneficial a sentiment, though slightly disfigured by popular usage,
into the appropriate philosophic terms. To this very sentiment it is,
this eternal _protest_ against the plausible and the speculative, not
as a flash sentiment for a gala dinner, but as a principle of action
operative from age to age in all parts of the national conduct, that
England is indebted more than she is to any other known influence for
her stupendous prosperity on two separate lines of progress: first, on
that of commercial enterprise; secondly, on that of political
improvement. At this moment there are two forces acting upon Christendom
which constitute the principles of movement all over Europe: these are,
the questions incident to representative government, and the mighty
interests combined by commercial enterprise. Both have radiated from
England as their centre. There only did the early models of either
activity prosper. Through North America, as the daughter of England,
these two forces have transplanted themselves to every principal region
(except one) of the vast Southern American continent. Thus, to push our
view no further, we behold one-half of the habitable globe henceforth
yoked to the two sole forces of _permanent_ movement for nations, since
war and religious contests are but intermitting forces; and these two
principles, we repeat, have grown to what we now behold chiefly through
the protection of this one great maxim which throws the hopes of the
world, not upon what the scheming understanding can suggest, but upon
what the most faithful experiment can prove.
_X. POPE AND DIDACTIC POETRY._
The 'Essay on Criticism' illustrates the same profound misconception of
the principle working at the root of Didactic Poetry as operated
originally to disturb the conduct of the 'Essay on Man' by its author,
and to disturb the judgments upon it by its critics. This 'Essay on
Criticism' no more aims at unfolding the grounds and theory of critical
rules applied to poetic composition, than does the _Epistola ad Pisones_
of Horace. But what if Horace and Pope both believed themselves the
professional expounders _ex cathedrá_ of these very grounds and this
very theory? No matter if they did. Nobody was less likely to understand
their own purposes than themselves. Their real purposes were _immanent_,
hidden in their poems; and from the poems they must be sought, not from
the poets; who, generally, in proportion as the problem is one of
analysis and evolution, for which, simply as the authors of the work,
Horace and Pope were no better qualified than other people, and, as
authors having that particular constitution of intellect which
notoriously they had, were much worse qualified than other people. We
cannot possibly allow a man to argue upon the meaning or tendency of his
own book, as against the evidence of the book itself. The book is
unexceptionable authority: and, as against _that_, the author has no
_locus standi_. Both Horace and Pope, however little they might be aware
of it, were secretly governed by the same moving principle--viz., not to
teach (which was impossible for two reasons)--but to use this very
impossibility, this very want of flexibility in the subject to the
ostensible purpose of the writers, as the resistance of the atmosphere
from which they would derive the motion of their wings. That it was
impossible in a poem seriously to teach the principles of criticism, we
venture to affirm on a double argument: 1st, that the teaching, if in
earnest, must be _polemic_: and how alien from the spirit of poetry to
move eternally through controversial discussions! 2ndly, that the
teaching, from the very necessities of metre, must be _eclectic_;
innumerable things must be suppressed; and how alien from the spirit of
science to move by discontinuous links according to the capricious
bidding of poetic decorum! Divinity itself is not more entangled in the
necessities of fighting for every step in advance, and maintaining the
ground by eternal preparation for hostility, than is philosophic
criticism; a discipline so little matured, that at this day we possess
in any language nothing but fragments and hints towards its
construction. To dispute in verse has been celebrated as the
accomplishment of Lucretius, of Sir John Davies, of Dryden: but then
this very disputation has always been eclectic; not exhausting even the
_essential_ arguments; but playing gracefully with those only which
could promise a brilliant effect. Such a mimic disputation is like a
histrionic fencing match, where the object of the actor is not in good
earnest to put his antagonist to the sword, but to exhibit a few elegant
passes in _carte_ and _tierce_, not forgetting the secondary object of
displaying to advantage any diamonds and rubies that may chance to
scintillate upon his sword-hand.
Had Pope, or had Horace, been requested to explain the _rationale_ of
his own poem on Criticism, it is pretty certain that each (and from the
same causes) would have talked nonsense. The very gifts so rare and so
exquisite by which these extraordinary men were adorned--the graceful
negligence, the delicacy of tact, the impassioned _abandon_[48] upon
subjects suited to their _modes_ of geniality, though not absolutely or
irreversibly incompatible with the sterner gifts of energetic attention
and powerful abstraction, were undoubtedly not in alliance with them.
The two sets of gifts did not exert a reciprocal stimulation. As well
might one expect from a man, because he was a capital shot, that he
should write the best essay on the theory of projectiles. Horace and
Pope, therefore, would have talked so absurdly in justifying or
explaining their own works, that we--naturally impatient of nonsense on
the subject of criticism, as our own _métier_--should have said, 'Oh,
dear gentlemen, stand aside for a moment, and we will right you in the
eyes of posterity: at which bar, if either of you should undertake to be
his own advocate, he will have a fool for his client.'
We do and must concede consideration even to the one-sided pleadings of
an advocate. But it is under the secret assumption of the concurrent
pleadings equally exaggerated on the adverse side. Without this
counterweight, how false would be our final summation of the evidence
upon most of the great state trials! Nay, even with both sides of the
equation before us, how perplexing would be that summation generally,
unless under the moderating guidance of a neutral and indifferent eye;
the eye of the judge in the first instance, and subsequently of the
upright historian--whether watching the case from the station of a
contemporary, or reviewing it from his place in some later generation.
Now what we wish to observe about Criticism is, that with just the same
temptation to personal partiality and even injustice in extremity, it
offers a much wider latitude to the distortion of things, facts,
grounds, and inferences. In fact, with the very same motives to a
personal bias swerving from the equatorial truth, it makes a much wider
opening for giving effect to those motives. Insincerity in short, and
every mode of contradicting the truth, is far more possible under a
professed devotion to a general principle than any personal expression
could possibly be.
If the logic of the case be steadily examined, a definition of didactic
poetry will emerge the very opposite to that popularly held: it will
appear that in didactic poetry the teaching is not the _power_, but the
_resistance_. It is difficult to teach even playfully or mimically in
reconciliation with poetic effect: and the object is to wrestle with
this difficulty. It is as when a man selects an absurd or nearly
impracticable subject, his own chin,[49] suppose, for the organ of a new
music: he does not select it as being naturally allied to music, but
for the very opposite reason--as being eminently alien from music, that
his own art will have the greater triumph in taming this reluctancy into
any sort of obedience to a musical purpose. It is a wrestle with all but
physical impossibility. Many arts and mechanic processes in human life
present intermitting aspects of beauty, scattered amongst others that
are utterly without interest of that sort. For instance, in husbandry,
where many essential processes are too mean to allow of any poetic
treatment or transfiguration, others are picturesque, and recommended by
remembrances of childhood to most hearts. How beautiful, for instance,
taken in all its variety of circumstances, the gorgeous summer, the gay
noontide repast, the hiding of children in the hay, the little toy of a
rake in the hands of infancy, is the hay-harvest from first to last!
Such cases wear a Janus aspect, one face connecting them with gross uses
of necessity, another connecting them with the gay or tender sentiments
that accidents of association, or some purpose of Providence, may have
thrown about them as a robe of beauty. Selecting therefore what meets
his own purpose, the poet proceeds by _resisting_ and rejecting all
those parts of the subject which would tend to defeat it. But at least,
it will be said, he does not resist those parts of the subject which he
selects. Yes, he _does_; even those parts he resists utterly in their
real and primary character, viz., as uses indispensable to the machinery
of man's animal life; and adopts them only for a collateral beauty
attached to the accidents of their evolution; a beauty oftentimes not
even guessed by those who are most familiar with them as practical
operations. It is as if a man, having a learned eye, should follow the
track of armies--careless of the political changes which they created,
or of the interests (all neutral as regarded any opinion of _his_) which
they disturbed--but alive to every form of beauty connected with these
else unmeaning hostilities--alive to the beauty of their battle-array,
to the pomp of their manoeuvres, to the awning of smoke-wreaths
surging above the artilleries, to the gleaming of sabres and bayonets at
intervals through loopholes in these gathering smoky masses. This man
would abstract from the politics and doctrines of the hostile armies, as
much as the didactic poet from the doctrinal part of his theme.
From this attempt to rectify the idea of didactic poetry, it will be
seen at once why Pope failed utterly and inevitably in the 'Essay on
Man.' The subject was too directly and commandingly interesting to
furnish any opening to that secondary and playful interest which arises
from the management by art and the subjugation of an intractable theme.
The ordinary interest of didactic poetry is derived from the _repellent_
qualities of the subject, and consequently from the dexterities of the
conflict with what is doubtful, indifferent, unpromising. Not only was
there no _resistance_ in the subject to the grandeur of poetry, but, on
the contrary, this subject offered so much grandeur, was so pathetic and
the amplitude of range so vast as to overwhelm the powers of any poet
and any audience, by its exactions. That was a fault in one direction.
But a different fault was--that the subject allowed no power of
selection. In ordinary didactic poetry, as we have just been insisting,
you sustain the interest by ignoring all the parts which will not bear a
steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by
mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be
intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an
unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no
discretion at all. This resource is denied. You _can_ give the truth
only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common didactic theme you
may neglect merely transitional parts with as much ease as benefit,
because they are familiar enough to be pre-supposed, and are besides
essential only in the real process, but not at all in the mimic process
of description; since A and C, that in the _reality_ could reach one
another only through B, may yet be intelligible as regards their beauty
without any intermediation of B. The ellipsis withdraws a deformity, and
does not generally create an obscurity: either the obscurity is none at
all, or is irrelevant to the real purpose of beauty, or may be treated
sufficiently by a line or two of adroit explanation. But in a poem
treating so vast a theme as man's relations to his own race, to his
habitation the world, to God his maker, and to all the commands of the
conscience, to the hopes of the believing heart, and to the eternal
self-conflicts of the intellect, it is clear that the purely
transitional parts, essential to the understanding of the whole, cannot
be omitted or dispensed with at the beck of the fancy or the necessities
of the metre and rhyme.
There is also an objection to Man (or any other theme of that grandeur)
as the subject of a didactic poem, which is more subtle, and which for
that reason we have reserved to the last. In the ordinary specimens of
didactic poetry, the theme and its sub-divisions wear (as we have
already observed) a double-faced or Janus aspect; one derived from the
direct experience of life, the other from the reflex experience of it.
And the very reason why one face _does_ affect you is because the other
does _not_. Thus a Morland farmyard, a Flemish tavern, or a clean
kitchen in an unpretending house seen by ruddy firelight reflected from
pewter ware, scarcely interests the eye at all in the reality; but for
that very reason it _does_ interest us all in the mimicry. The very fact
of seeing an object framed as it were, insulated, suddenly _relieved_ to
the steady consciousness, which all one's life has been seen _un_framed,
_not_ called into relief, but depressed into the universal level of
subconsciousness, awakens a pleasurable sense of surprise. But now Man
is too great a subject to allow of any unrelieved aspects. What the
reader sees he must see directly and without insulation, else falseness
and partiality are immediately apparent.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] We speak here of Horace in his lyrical character, and of Pope as he
revealed himself in his tender and pathetic sincerities, not in his
false, counterfeit scorn. Horace, a good-natured creature, that laughed
eternally in his satire, was probably sincere. Pope, a benign one, could
not have been sincere in the bitter and stinging personalities of his
satires. Horace seems to be personal, but is not. Neither is Juvenal;
the names he employs are mere allegoric names. _Draco_ is any bloody
fellow; _Favonius_ is any sycophant: but Pope is very different.
[49] 'His own chin,' chin-chopping, as practised in our days, was not an
original invention; it was simply a restoration from the days of Queen
Anne.
_XI. SHAKSPEARE AND WORDSWORTH_.
I take the opportunity of referring to the work of a very eloquent
Frenchman, who has brought the names of Wordsworth and Shakspeare into
connection, partly for the sake of pointing out an important error in
the particular criticism on Wordsworth, but still more as an occasion
for expressing the gratitude due to the French author for the able,
anxious, and oftentimes generous justice which he has rendered to
English literature. It is most gratifying to a thoughtful
Englishman--that precisely from that period when the mighty drama of the
French Revolution, like the Deluge, or like the early growth of
Christianity, or like the Reformation, had been in operation long enough
to form a new and more thoughtful generation in France, has the English
literature been first studied in France, and first appreciated. Since
1810, when the generation moulded by the Revolution was beginning to
come forward on the stage of national action, a continued series of able
writers amongst the French--ardent, noble, profound--have laid aside
their nationality in the most generous spirit for the express purpose of
investigating the great English models of intellectual power, locally so
near to their own native models, and virtually in such polar remoteness.
Chateaubriand's intense enthusiasm for Milton, almost monomaniac in the
opinion of some people, is notorious. This, however, was less
astonishing: the pure marble grandeur of Milton, and his classical
severity, naturally recommended themselves to the French taste, which
can always understand the beauty of proportion and regular or teleologic
tendencies. It was with regard to the anomalous, and to that sort of
vaster harmonies which from moving upon a wider scale are apt at first
sight to pass for discords, that a new taste needed to be created in
France. Here Chateaubriand showed himself a Frenchman of the old leaven.
Milton would always have been estimated in France. He needed only to be
better known. Shakspeare was the _natural_ stone of offence: and with
regard to _him_ Chateaubriand has shown himself eminently blind. His
reference to Shakspeare's _female_ gallery, so divine as that Pantheon
really is, by way of most forcibly expressing his supposed inferiority
to Racine (who strictly speaking has no female pictures at all, but
merely _umrisse_ or outlines in pencil) is the very perfection of human
blindness. But many years ago the writers in _Le Globe_, either by
direct papers on the drama or indirectly by way of references to the
acting of Kean, etc., showed that even as to Shakspeare a new heart was
arising in France. M. Raymond de Véricour, though necessarily called off
to a more special consideration of the Miltonic poetry by the very
promise of his title (_Milton, et la Poésie Epique_: Paris et Londres,
1838), has in various places shown a far more comprehensive sense of
poetic truth than Chateaubriand. His sensibility, being originally
deeper and trained to move upon a larger compass, vibrates equally under
the chords of the Shakspearian music. Even he, however, has made a
serious mistake as to Wordsworth in his relation to Shakspeare. At p.
420 he says: 'Wordsworth qui (de même que Byron) sympathise pen
cordialement avec Shakspeare, se prosterne cependant comme Byron devant
le _Paradis perdu_; Milton est la grande idole de Wordsworth; il ne
craint pas quelquefois de se comparer lui-même à son géant;' (never
unless in the single accident of praying for a similar audience--'fit
audience let me find though few'); 'et en vérité ses sonnets ont souvent
le même esprit prophétique, la même élévation sacrée que ceux de
l'Homère anglais.' There cannot be graver mistakes than are here brought
into one focus. Lord Byron cared little for the 'Paradise Lost,' and had
studied it not at all. On the other hand, Lord Byron's pretended
disparagement of Shakspeare by comparison with the meagre, hungry and
bloodless Alfieri was a pure stage trick, a momentary device for
expressing his Apemantus misanthropy towards the English people. It
happened at the time he had made himself unpopular by the circumstances
of his private life: these, with a morbid appetite for engaging public
attention, he had done his best to publish and to keep before the public
eye; whilst at the same time he was very angry at the particular style
of comments which they provoked. There was no fixed temper of anger
towards him in the public mind of England: but he believed that there
was. And he took his revenge through every channel by which he fancied
himself to have a chance for reaching and stinging the national pride;
1st, by ridiculing the English pretensions to higher principle and
national morality; but _that_ failing, 2ndly, by disparaging Shakspeare;
3rdly, on the same principle which led Dean Swift to found the first
lunatic hospital in Ireland, viz.:
'To shew by one satiric touch
No nation wanted it so much.'
Lord Byron, without any _sincere_ opinion or care upon the subject one
way or other, directed in his will--that his daughter should not marry
an Englishman: this bullet, he fancied, would take effect, even though
the Shakspeare bullet had failed. Now, as to Wordsworth, he values both
in the highest degree. In a philosophic poem, like the 'Excursion,' he
is naturally led to speak more pointedly of Milton: but his own
affinities are every way more numerous and striking to Shakspeare. For
this reason I have myself been led to group him with Shakspeare. In
those two poets alike is seen the infinite of Painting: in Æschylus and
Milton alike are seen the simplicities and stern sublimiities of
Sculpture.
_XII. CRITICISM ON SOME OF COLERIDGE'S CRITICISMS OF WORDSWORTH._